Terminator: rise of the machines – real world Facebook edition!

The machines have made their own language! Well… no, they weren’t actual machines, but rather chatbots. The news has been all over the internet, Facebook AI developing their own language to better communicate with each other. Seems scary doesn’t it? Not really… they are just chatbots (for now), so I guess the most they could do is talk us into extinction.

Sure I do truly believe that AI will someday pose a real threat to humanity (John Connor will surely save us), but this won’t be happening anytime soon.

Facebook’s doomsday

So what is this all really about? Back in June, Facebook published that FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) are introducing chatbots with the ability to negotiate with humans or each other.

As mentioned in their blog post, the reason behind all of this was:

“This work represents an important step for the research community and bot developers toward creating chatbots that can reason, converse, and negotiate, all key steps in building a personalized digital assistant.”

A few days later, the bots started communicating in a way that wouldn’t make sense to anyone reading.

What happened right there is that the chatbots altered the English language for a more efficient interaction between themselves. But it doesn’t stop at Facebook, Google also previously reported the same thing. As I mentioned before, should this really worry us? Probably… as you can see, the language created is really annoying!

Joking aside, this whole news is really interesting and highlights just how far AI development has reached. Right now, AI is a huge field, with many startups launching worldwide focusing on AI.